Eisenhower (49 page)

They did not stop trying, however, and eventually Ike capitulated. He was particularly affected by a conversation with Winthrop Aldrich, a financier and former ambassador (Eisenhower appointed him to the Court of St. James early in his presidency) and one of the wealthy business leaders whose advice Eisenhower so often solicited. Unlike so many of those calling for Adams’s resignation, Aldrich liked him. The trouble, Aldrich emphasized, was that Adams had publicly professed his great friendship for Goldfine, who now was widely regarded as a crook. That was too much: “This man [Adams] has got to go or we are done.” Ike protested a bit more, emphasizing Adams’s work and dedication, but he knew Aldrich was right.

So Ike sent Nixon back to Adams in the company of Meade Alcorn, chairman of the Republican National Committee. Their task was to persuade him that he had become a political liability, that Goldfine was dragging down the party and compromising its future leaders. This time, Adams heard the message. Eisenhower groused about the power of “cheap politicians” to “pillory an honorable man,” but he cut his deputy loose to protect his administration. Once it was done, Ike relaxed, seemingly for the first time in weeks. He dictated a few letters, signed some pictures, and went out shopping with his old friend George Allen. They stopped at a roadside stand for a pumpkin, startling the girl at the register because she did not recognize the president. Then they dropped in at a Howard Johnson and bought everyone there an ice cream. Presumably, Allen paid; Eisenhower rarely carried money. The next day, Adams called the president and offered his resignation. Eisenhower accepted.

Adams lingered for a while, forcing Eisenhower to nudge him out of his office. But on September 22, he announced publicly that he was leaving. Adams and Eisenhower both insisted he had done nothing wrong, and Adams would stubbornly cling to that notion long after Goldfine had been convicted in the court of public opinion and tax court as well. Eisenhower presented Adams with a silver bowl, and his assistant went home to New Hampshire. The inscription on the bowl was signed by “his devoted friend, Dwight D. Eisenhower.”

For Eisenhower, Adams’s departure was in one sense a relief—the fight had been long and distracting. Just two days before Adams resigned, Khrushchev had threatened nuclear war over Quemoy and Matsu, and on that same day a deranged woman lunged at Martin Luther King in a Harlem store, stabbing him in the chest and barely missing his heart. It was no time for a president to be hobbled by an ineffective assistant.

To replace Adams, Eisenhower selected General Jerry Persons. Persons was amiable and easygoing where Adams was brusque, mellifluous where Adams was clipped, and one contemporary compared the transition to a move from “hard cider to mellow bourbon.” Persons was an old friend—the two met back when Ike was working for MacArthur, and Persons was such an effective congressional advocate for the Army that Marshall turned down Eisenhower’s request to bring him to Europe during the war. Now, as Adams’s successor, he had Eisenhower’s abiding appreciation, but he struggled to adjust to the new job. While Adams’s stern blockade at Eisenhower’s door had angered those who wanted greater access to the president, Persons’s lighter touch added to Ike’s burden. He complained to Whitman that “the staff seemed to descend upon him in droves and dump everything in his lap.” It was, she added, much worse “than when Adams was here.” Persons also sounded out staff for advice, again, a likable trait and one notably in contrast to Adams’s imperiousness. But that, too, bogged people down in long meetings. Ike gently chided Persons about it.

In the shuffle of advisers, Eisenhower drew one of his most trusted intimates into the White House. John reported for duty on October 8. His father had always been tough, and it was no different now that he formally served him as his president. John avoided referring to him as “Dad,” preferring instead to call him “Boss.” And Ike gave him no special privilege. He would bark at his son just as he did his staff, forgive him just as readily, appreciate him just as deeply. For John, there was no escaping the call to duty. It was, he reflected, “the long arm of the White House,” and it drew him “once more into the Boss’s orbit.” Cinching the bond, John moved his wife and children into a converted schoolhouse in Gettysburg, just down the road from Ike and Mamie.

Adams had been sacrificed to solidify the Republican showing in the midterm elections. Come Election Day, however, it fell well short of its goal. Ike did his part. He traveled, delivered speeches, raised money even for Bill Knowland, who was running for governor of California. (Knowland lost and never regained a position in politics. In 1974, he shot and killed himself.) But southern Democrats railed against Little Rock. Northern Democrats turned to organized labor for financial and political support. In contrast, the Republicans were divided. Democrats picked up thirteen seats in the Senate, breaking Republican strongholds in the industrial East, the mid-Atlantic region, and even the Plains states. It was, the
New York Times
reported, “a national triumph.” It was not all bad news for Eisenhower: the Democratic tide also swept out remnants of the Republican old guard, the die-hard supporters of McCarthy and Knowland, the isolationists of the Taft and MacArthur era. Still, it was a trouncing, and largely one of the GOP’s own doing. “The faults of the Republican Party are many,” Eisenhower acknowledged to Harold Macmillan in a letter a few days after the votes were in. “If I could devote myself exclusively to a political job, I’d like to take on the one of reorganizing and revitalizing the Party.”

The congressional defeats were dispiriting, but sadder still was the loss of one of Ike’s oldest friends. Beginning in early 1957, Swede Hazlett had faced a series of ailments. He had high blood pressure and headaches. Treated at Bethesda—he was a Navy man—he underwent tests and responded initially to treatment. But in April 1958, he had a lung removed, and he faded to the point that he was a “virtual shut-in.” Ike sent flowers, flattered him with briefings on world affairs, visited him in the hospital. Hazlett struggled to correspond with his old friend, but the labor of writing was too much. When he died in November, he left an unfinished note to Ike among his things.

Swede’s passing took from Ike his most faithful friend, a tie to his youth, and a stalwart admirer to whom Eisenhower had unburdened himself for decades. “I can never quite tell you what Swede meant to me,” the president wrote to Hazlett’s widow. “While I am glad for his sake that he suffers no longer, his passing leaves a permanent void in my life.”

It was then, shortly after Adams’s farewell and Hazlett’s death, that Khrushchev decided to test Eisenhower’s firmness. Khrushchev had watched as Eisenhower cut a deal with China to avoid a nuclear war in Asia. Was that a reflection of a new American weakness? A fear of growing Soviet nuclear power? If the United States was moving to accommodating Communism rather than confronting it, maybe it was time for Khrushchev to act.

Near the end of 1958, he decided to challenge Western strength not at the margins of the Cold War but rather in the heart of Europe, in the city most riven by the divisions of the era. On November 10, 1958, Khrushchev announced that the time had come to end the occupation of Berlin. And on November 27, Thanksgiving, he followed that up with an ultimatum, delivered orally to Western journalists in Moscow and in writing to Ike: vacate West Berlin in six months or have it pass into the control of East Germany. Eisenhower understood that if he walked away from Berlin, as he told John, “no one in the world could have any confidence in any pledge we make.”

American policy with respect to Berlin was honed by previous conflict over that Western outpost, precariously isolated deep inside East Germany. Truman had rescued Berlin by airlift in 1948 and 1949. The Soviets eventually withdrew their blockade, but a decade later Berlin remained just as vulnerable and just as vital to Western prestige. It was, as Khrushchev alternately complained, a “thorn,” a “cancer,” and a “bone in my throat.” In 1958, just as in 1948, the United States was prepared to wage war to protect Berlin—“all-out war,” as James Forrestal, Truman’s secretary of defense, had once described it; “general war,” as Eisenhower now imagined it. In the intervening years, little had changed in Berlin, but much had changed inside the Soviet Union. Now that he was armed with nuclear weapons—how many, the United States did not know—Khrushchev’s ultimatum threatened not just war in Europe but the destruction of mankind. The Soviet premier taunted Eisenhower. “Only madmen can go the length of unleashing another world war over the preservation of privileges of occupiers in West Berlin,” he warned in a note to the American ambassador in Moscow. “If such madmen should really appear, there is no doubt that straitjackets could be found for them.”

Khrushchev’s long deadline allowed for negotiations and forced the Eisenhower administration again to confront the question of whether the United States was prepared to wage a nuclear war in defense of an ally. Nuclear weapons, if they were used in defense of Berlin, would be released in a mass attack that would not just drive the Soviets from Berlin or Europe but also destroy every vestige of their government and society. “Our whole stack is in this play,” Eisenhower emphasized to his aides. In the event of a Soviet attack on Berlin, America’s response would be simple: “Hit the Russians as hard as we could.”

Yet even as Ike girded for war, he and John Foster Dulles furiously explored diplomatic alternatives. Dulles worked to cement Western unity—no small feat given that the American strategy in the event of a war almost certainly relied upon atomizing much of Europe. Eisenhower’s military and civilian aides urged him to adopt a firm response if Khrushchev turned Berlin over to East Germany. As with Quemoy-Matsu, however, Eisenhower refused to be pinned down. He insisted he was prepared for general war and yet steadfastly declined to treat Khrushchev’s ultimatum as an imminent danger. Berlin was, Eisenhower complained, an “illogical” military position, but it was a political necessity and as such required American defense. Some of Ike’s aides argued for a quick military probe to test the seriousness of the Soviet threat. Eisenhower refused. He would not lurch into an error.

Eisenhower’s effort was both complicated and simplified by his adversary: Khrushchev was adamantly reckless and also shockingly easy to appease. He unveiled his Berlin ultimatum without even cursory consultation with the Kremlin leadership, and he escalated the crisis without any clear strategy. He was prepared to accept Western capitulation and imagined that negotiations along the lines that resolved Quemoy and Matsu might yield some advantage to the Soviet Union. He wanted to force a summit—that much seemed evident—and he coveted an invitation to visit the United States. Beyond those, the Soviet leader seemed to have few specific objectives as he bumbled toward a superpower confrontation.

Eisenhower, by contrast, was clear on his strategic objectives and flexible in tactical response. He refused to abandon Berlin and gambled that Khrushchev would not actually risk war to press his claims against the city. All through the winter of 1958 and 1959, intelligence reports confirmed that basic premise: Khrushchev, the Americans believed, would make demands and accept concessions but would not risk annihilation.

Eisenhower knew that part of Khrushchev’s plan was to force a summit, and he therefore resisted the idea. The British, by contrast, favored such a gathering, and, as in 1955, Eisenhower reluctantly agreed to consider it. On March 20, with the Soviet deadline growing nearer, the president entertained Harold Macmillan at Gettysburg, and the two capped their official conversations with a long ride around the Eisenhower farm. When they returned after dusk, Macmillan was darkly troubled. As they contemplated the risk before them, an “exceedingly emotional” Macmillan pleaded with Eisenhower to agree to a summit, begging him to recognize that an attack on England with just “eight bombs,” a phrase he used repeatedly, could wipe out twenty to thirty million of his countrymen. If a nuclear war seemed imminent, Macmillan asked for time to evacuate Britons to Canada and Australia.

Taken aback by Macmillan’s plea, Eisenhower reminded the prime minister that estimates of American casualties in a global war exceeded sixty-seven million and that, even so, he refused to “escape war by surrendering on the installment plan.” Eisenhower would not be “dragooned to a summit,” but did allow that he would consider attending if the foreign ministers would meet first and produce some evidence that a high-level conference would result in progress. Even slight progress, Eisenhower said, might be enough to justify the summit that Khrushchev desired and that Macmillan believed was the way out of the crisis. Macmillan was an old man at the end of a long career. This, he said, was “a duty he owed his people” and stood likely to be “the most fateful decision he would ever have to take.” With that, the two men joined their aides for dinner. They capped the evening with a Western. Macmillan remembered it as “The Great Country or some such name”—it was, undoubtedly,
The Big Country
. “It lasted three hours!” he exclaimed to his diary. “It was inconceivably banal.”

Macmillan’s appeal supplied the breakthrough that both sides sought. Six days later, the United States formally proposed a foreign ministers’ meeting, to be followed by a summit if progress warranted it. The Berlin crisis, triggered by Khrushchev’s impetuous dare, began to recede. Berlin would remain a hostage to the Cold War for decades, but the imminent threat to its survival had passed by the middle of 1959, allowing the city to resume its place as a locus of tension rather than a flash point of war.

Before the crisis could be resolved entirely, the stress of those dangerous years would claim another victim close to Ike. Ever since 1956, John Foster Dulles had battled cancer. His first operation, just after the Suez crisis, removed a tumor but did not get everything. Dulles worked on. Early in 1959, however, his illness overcame his stoicism. He complained of discomfort and warned one old ally, Adenauer, that he was going to need surgery to repair a hernia. A few days later, he checked into Walter Reed hospital. Once doctors opened him up, they realized his cancer had returned. General Snyder, Eisenhower’s personal physician, monitored the operation and immediately reported that the results were “not good.”